Oprah Interview

Lance Speaks

(Photo by Armstrong's doping admissions to Oprah opened the former racer to charges of fraud. (courtesy OWN))

Lance Armstrong, whose transcendent cycling performances and personal and charitable battle against cancer made him a sporting and cultural icon, admitted to rampant cheating during his record-breaking Tour de France reign in an interview with Oprah Winfrey televised Thursday night.

Appearing somber but clear-eyed during the 90-minute broadcast, Armstrong, 41, admitted to taking illegal performance enhancers EPO and testosterone, and to transfusing his own blood—all of which he referred to as his “cocktail”—during the course of winning an unprecedented seven Tours, from 1999 to 2005. “I view this situation as one big lie that I repeated lots of times,” he said.

Armstrong, wearing a dark-colored blazer and open-collared Oxford shirt, answered questions carefully, often pausing before answering. But he scarcely exhibited his trademark defiance, even when Winfrey repeatedly challenged him to explain how it was possible he didn’t realize how big his fraudulent story had become. Instead, he often chuckled uncomfortably before giving difficult answers, as in one exchange in which Winfrey asked him if he was a bully. “Yeah—yeah, I was a bully,” he replied.

Armstrong said that even as he was taking the drugs and denying doing so, he hadn’t felt he was doing anything wrong, and hadn’t felt bad about it or that he was cheating in an era when doping was ubiquitous in the pro peloton. “I viewed it as a level playing field,” he said.

The interview between two stars easily recognized by only their first names was taped in an Austin, Texas, hotel days earlier. It is destined to join the pantheon of televised mea culpas by sports superstars ranging from Tiger Woods to Kobe Bryant to Mark McGwire—although in this case, the stakes seem higher than in any previous admission. Armstrong’s confession—stunning, in a way, even though widespread public awareness of his guilt set in months ago—could result in indictments, lawsuits, and a dramatic overhaul at the highest levels of the sport.

Armstrong said he began doping early in his career using cortisone, but then, as he ramped upward in the professional ranks in the mid 1990s, “the EPO generation began.” For more than a decade Armstrong had forcefully and categorically denied all charges that he doped—to the point that he threatened or initiated legal action when accusations surfaced in various journalistic accounts and from former friends and employees.

Armstrong acknowledged some of those people in the interview, including Betsy Andreu and Emma O’Reilly, a team masseuse whom he attacked for breaking ranks and accusing him of doping—accurately, Armstrong now acknowledged. “She’s one of these people that I have to apologize to,” he said, noting he had already reached out to her. “She’s one of these people that got run over, got bullied.”

He described his actions as “inexcusable,” and noted, “When I say there are people that will hear that and will never forgive me, I understand that. I do.”

But in a moment that no doubt left close watchers of the Armstrong saga wanting, he refused to directly address the now-famous incident in which Andreu said she heard Armstrong confess, while lying in a hospital room in 1996, to using PEDs.

He rarely hid behind the cancer shield as he has done in the past. But he did attribute this campaign of vicious attacks on his accusers to the do-whatever-it-takes approach that he developed during his successful fight against the disease. “I took that ruthless and relentless and win-at-all-cost attitude into cycling,” he said.

Armstrong wasn’t fully forthcoming in some of his answers, saying he didn’t want to talk about other people. He also sometimes claimed not to remember specific incidents. And he denied some of the accusations made against him, including that he paid off the UCI to erase a positive doping test; that he pointedly told other riders on his team to take part in a PED regimen; and that he continued doping during a comeback that began in 2009.

But Armstrong acknowledged that he had disappointed his supporters—that he now grasped the magnitude of what he did and sees the anger and betrayal in those who believed in him. “They have every right to feel betrayed, and it’s my fault,” he said. “I will spend the rest of my life trying to earn back trust and apologize to people.”

The U.S. Anti-Doping Agency stripped Armstrong of his seven Tour titles last year and issued a 1,000-page report detailing sweeping charges against him. The USADA report painted him as the driving force behind the most sophisticated and elaborate doping episode in cycling’s scandal-cratered past.

He admitted he regretted his 2009 return to the sport, which he said ultimately triggered the investigations into his previous Tours. “We wouldn’t be sitting here,” he told Winfrey, “if I didn’t come back.”

Armstrong was circumspect about his reasons for giving the interview and for confessing now. “That’s the best question,” he told Winfrey. “That’s the most logical question. I don’t know that I have a great answer.” Many observers have speculated that, among other motives, he is hoping for a reduction of his lifetime ban from competitive sports such as triathlons and marathons.

Trailers for the second half of the interview indicate that Winfrey posed the question of his motives—along with queries into the fallout for the Livestrong foundation, and what Armstrong has told his children. The rest of the program will air on Winfrey’s OWN network and stream simultaneously on her website Friday at 9 p.m. EST.